sally mann

[moxiemylove]

Sally Mann is a contemporary photographer repeatedly charged as a professional provocateur with a camera. Her use of her children as subjects has been called pornographic and she has been threatened with the closure of exhibitions and deprivation of maternal rights.

Comments

[venetia]

hmm someone on my f/list has been using that top image as an icon for years and I never knew where it was from.

I personally don't like these photographs at all; precisely because I can remember my childhood particularly well (maternal surveillance and becoming an object for others were not my childhood priorities, and I can recall childhood search-and-destroy operations my sister and I mounted against photographs of this tone).

However, I think it is a personal parenting decision, and the threats against her are obscene.

[moxiemylove]

"search and destroy missions.." heh. I remember too. Trying to nip these photos in the bud even before the shutter clicked. (There's a bathtub series of me at age 6 that came about only after prolonged negotiations with my mother - bartering embarrassment and sense of shame on the one side with maternal possessiveness and sense of cute on the other)

[peterbilt_47]

I really wrestle with Sally Mann. To me, she is undeniably asking us to relate to children sexually the way we would to another adult. Which, aaaighh.

At the same time, there is something more human than the merely prurient going on, and I find the pictures formally beautiful in their own right.

It's hard for me to articulate how she challenges the way I relate to children. Perhaps so much of her power comes from the trust and responsibility she invests in her viewers.

I like the stuff you bring up in your journal. Is it OK if I add you?

[cult_of_isis]

"To me, she is undeniably asking us to relate to children sexually the way we would to another adult."

I don't think she's asking anyone to relate to adults and children in the same way. I think she's showing us that children are sexual beings too, which has been proven over and over again in psychological and sociological studies.

Frankly, I don't think people should relate to others as a "child" or as an "adult" in the first place, but as individuals who have a unique sexuality.

"It's hard for me to articulate how she challenges the way I relate to children."

It's wonderful that her art has made you think about this :)
It's high time Western societies recognized that children are sexual beings.

[peterbilt_47]

Yeah, I think we're really uncomfortable acknowledging and knowing how to deal with children as sexual beings. And I do think a lot of Sally Mann's pictures have to do with children's sexuality and their beauty just for their own sake.

I guess it's the ones where she dresses the kids up in the trappings of adulthood that make me uncomfortable. But then, I suppose the point there is to get your gears turning.

[ebonbird]

Hi there.

I came to your journal by way of skin-of-color.

Provocative post. I'll be wrestling with/thinking of it and what it means for me and maybe what I think it means for others. I'm grateful it wasn't an f-locked post.

Thanks for being open with this one.

Hi back

[moxiemylove]

Happy to oblige.

[cult_of_isis]

I like these! They're so interesting. I know of this photographer, and I think it's so sick that anyone could accuse her of creating child pornography. What a paranoid society we live in, eh?

[sanji9]

I like her sytle